Monthly Archives: January 2014

Nightingale 1.12.1 is finally released! Existing installations of the last release version of Nightingale (1.12) on Windows or Mac OS X will give you the opportunity to automatically update to the new version. For Linux users the packages are updated; if you installed from a tarball on Linux you’ll have to update by grabbing a new one from the download page.

What’s new?

We cleaned up quite a bit: More legacy code from Songbird was removed or disabled, thus we expect the release to be more stable. There are also some bugs fixed, such as the Unity integration causing a crash in Ubuntu 13.04, battery drain in OS X Lion or newer and playback not properly updating the play counts.

As mentioned in a previous blog post, freaktechnik implemented some beautiful firstrun pages, which will present you changes after updates or overall information on the very first start. Through our newly introduced statistics page, this will also help us to track installations and upgrades to find update-related issues. Note that if you dislike the firstrun page, you can visit about:config and set the preference ‘nightingale.update.url’ to ”.

Additionally, GeekShadow implemented a new localization infrastructure and will contact past Songbird translators. He got rid of the last Songbird references, and thanks to our translators and reviewers many locales were improved quite a lot. However, there are still some locales without maintainers; and even if your locale already has one it would be great if you volunteer for proofreading and translating Nightingale’s strings! When updating, you may need to re-download the language packs for this change to take effect.

We also did some backend work switching to a new update infrastructure, as Google Code shuts down its downloads section. Updates are now handled through GitHub, where we also keep our main source code repository. An issue preventing Linux updates got fixed as well, so you should be able to auto-update from tarballs in the future.

As this is our first release after the shutdown of Songbird we replaced everything provided through Songbird infrastructure with our own services. To see everything we changed in 1.12.1, check out the official release notes.

The IDs of some add-ons changed, namely mashTape, SHOUTcast and Last.fm. This means Nightingale will find new add-ons and ask you, if you want to install them. Since the ID changed, they will not override the existing extensions. The previous versions of those add-ons will show up in the extensions manager as incompatible with Nightingale 1.12.1 and can be uninstalled.

Unity and libnotify integration have been split up into two optional components. Thanks to this the nightingale-nounity package now also includes libnotify integration. For those who don’t want, or can’t use our PPA, we still offer GNOME/Unity integration builds.

Enjoy the latest version of Nightingale, update or install it and listen to your favorite songs. We’d love to hear your feedback in the forums or on the IRC channel, #nightingale on irc.mozilla.org. As always, we’re looking for testers, developers, theme makers, and users to idle in our forums and IRC, not to mention help out with the project. Feel free to join!

Yesterday I landed a new feature in the trunk for 1.12.1. What it does is simply welcoming new users with a firstrun page with helpful information and users who updated with the changelog. This seems like a feature that doesn’t need testing. But it does, because it also serves as a way to measure the amount of installs and upgrades. Currently the stats are running on a test server and you can see them here. All data captured until release will be deleted.

Another reason why it needs testing, is because I had to mess with the session restore component of Nightingale. The same file, could cause a blank page on startup sometimes, but that should be fixed (or not?) . To be sure, that I messed nothing up I need other people than me to use Nightingale with this change, as I have my particular habits, and issues might only occur when you use Nightingale in a different way than I do.

Of course you can also disable the upgrade page, which shows you the changes after an upgrade. To do so just set the preference “nightingale.update.url” to “”. This is one possible reason, why our statistics for upgrades won’t be exact, while we can count on the install statistics (unless for modified builds of Nightingale, of course). Another reason are anti-tracking add-ons or disabled JavaScript.

All other changes Nightingale 1.12.1 currently contains are listed under the release notes. You will see the full release of it before January the 14th, as after this date our integrated updating system will be broken.

You can download a build of Nightingale including the changes from SourceForge or, if your system uses apt, install it from ppa:nightingaleteam/nightingale-nightly. Please report any issues you encounter on GitHub, but please make sure the issue hasn’t been reported yet. Also bear in mind that this is not a release version and might destroy your profile, so only use your existing profile if you don’t care about it, or create a new one by launching Nightingale with the -p argument.